PULL QUOTE:  ‘Exploiting ethnic electoral arithmetic for the purpose of thrusting themselves into political power aggressively drives the thinking and motivation of these political aspirants; and where such arithmetic may hurt their chances, they begin the charade of conjuring up notions of political expediency and circumvention of democracy’
AT ELECTION-time, there are always the usual political aspirants who attempt to turn Guyana into a laboratory for political experiments, making it quite susceptible to the vicissitudes of ethnic electoral arithmetic. Political experiments become an attractive option for those whose arithmetical calculations paint a picture of their aspiring political demise. Under such laboratory conditions, self-gratification becomes the in-thing for these political aspirants, those who want to live off politics, and those who want to live for politics.
Exploiting ethnic electoral arithmetic for the purpose of thrusting themselves into political power aggressively drives the thinking and motivation of these political aspirants; and where such arithmetic may hurt their chances, they begin the charade of conjuring up notions of political expediency and circumvention of democracy.
Generally, under such conditions, self-interests take precedence over national interests; where the appearances of political proposals for governance weigh in, underpinning the view that certain ethnic groups are excluded from the political equation in multiethnic societies. Some of these proposals pertaining to power sharing and coalitions become surreptitiously the surrogates for what they see as the malady of ethnic politics.
And in order to consistently pursue their political adventures at election times, they engage in a defense mechanism called projection; where they project to some other entity the practice of ethnic politics, when they themselves do so to secure some psychological gratification of minimal political accomplishment.
For these reasons, we see the insubstantial proposals on power sharing and the formation of ‘shell’ coalitions. Recently, I noted that the power sharing crowd: “…should understand that there may be governments in multiethnic societies, without a power sharing matrix, that work toward meeting the interests and needs of all ethnic groups; where development is a prominent political feature; and where the foundations of such governments are guided by the principles of democracy. Nevertheless, such sustained rhetoric may signify that power sharing advocates reject democracy and development. Given that democracy and ethnic equitability in reward allocations prevail in Guyana (and there may be some exceptions), there is then little need for constant rhetoric on the political ethnic arithmetic, which may retard development…”
Many of the assumptions underpinning the power sharing proposals in Guyana are flawed; for instance, power sharing proposals posit that: Guyana has a pure Westminster –style government, when it does not; Guyana has evidence-based data on ethnic exclusion, when there is none; principals of power sharing have a verifiable solid constituency, when that is not the case; there will be equal power sharing, when their proposals have no such structure. There are other flawed assumptions of this genre. In addition, in these power sharing proposals, there is no clarity to establish that their assumptions have been tested and found to be satisfactory. The proposal is not appropriate until there is some adequate conclusion to this exercise.
Another factor is the question of representativeness and efficiency. There is practically no discussion on the size of power sharing coalitions. The larger the size, the larger the number of veto players which could undermine efficiency; and then having a manageable reduced size could impair representativeness. Power sharing arrangements could produce what LeVan (2006) calls diminishing returns because of a large coalition size. Clearly, any tradeoff between efficiency and representativeness could impair government’s performance. There is nothing about the relationship between efficiency and representativeness embedded in the power sharing proposals in Guyana. Furthermore, advocates are  not clear on how they would address accountability in government in power sharing arrangements. And then, indeed, there are the flawed assumptions.